Word: asterisked
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...with The Ninemile Wolves, a moody nonfiction report of a Canadian wolf pack that crossed the U.S. border a few years ago and colonized one of the western states. But Bass's fiction (The Book of Yaak, In the Loyal Mountains) seems to get categorized as good-with-an-asterisk. He's regional. (So was Wallace Stegner, of course, until he became a national monument.) Bass may reach monument or even wilderness-area status in time, but for the moment he gathers honorable obscurity, and blackflies, on the shelf reserved for nature writers...
...view here is, forget that asterisk. With the publication of The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (Houghton Mifflin; 190 pages; $23), a collection of novellas about men and women in nature, there should be no more avoiding plain truth: Rick Bass is a very good writer of fiction. What's more, he's good at a kind of writing that is often done with irritating self-consciousness. Bringing the natural world into a story as something more than scenery invites a rich array of overdelicate word-painting and drum-roll weather effects, with turning seasons or the death and birth...
...particularly galling to Major, since both candidates take essentially the same position on the EU. The difference is mainly in mood: While Blair sounds notes of hope and confidence, Major is so uncertain that his own troops are deserting him. Still, the paper did present the endorsement with an asterisk, chiding Blair for not spelling out what "New Labour" actually stands for other than a more charismatic version of existing government policies. "The closer Mr. Blair has got to power, the less impressive he has appeared," the paper wrote. With one campaign day remaining, Blair seems close to power indeed...
This is, as an AIDS expert puts it, hope with an asterisk. Even if Ho's treatment works, there is still no magic bullet for patients in late stages of the disease and no vaccine that will inoculate against HIV infection. The cost of the cocktails (up to $20,000 a year) puts them beyond the reach of all but the best-insured patients--and out of the question for the 90% who live in the developing world...
...These new treatments are like hope with an asterisk," says R. Scott Hitt, chairman of the White House Council on AIDS. Yet the signs of something changing are everywhere. In California, Sherman Oaks Hospital has shut down its AIDS unit, which used to hold 40 or more patients. In some recent months, the patient population dropped to three. In Los Angeles the AIDS Healthcare Foundation closed one of its three hospices. "This is the most important year in the history of the AIDS epidemic," says the foundation's president, Michael Weinstein. "For the first time, we made more progress than...